What is Cosanti?
There is a hedge on Doubletree Ranch Road with nothing behind it except one of the most original pieces of architecture in North America, and you can walk in for free.
Cosanti is the home, studio and foundry that Paolo Soleri — an Italian architect who arrived in 1947 as an apprentice in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship — began building in 1956 on a few acres of Paradise Valley desert, just west of the Scottsdale line on the Camelback corridor. He stayed until he died in 2013. In between he invented a way of building that nobody had tried at scale: earth-casting. Pile up dirt in the shape you want the inside to be, pour concrete over it, wait, then dig the dirt out from underneath. What you are left with are shells, domes and quarter-sphere apses — most of them turned south, so the low winter sun comes in and the high summer sun never does.
The place is half sunken, deeply shaded, entirely handmade, and hung with hundreds of bronze and ceramic windbells, which are not souvenirs bolted on afterward but the economic engine of the whole enterprise. Soleri sold bells to pay for buildings, apprentices and eventually the land for Arcosanti, the experimental town he founded seventy miles north in 1970. The bells are still cast here, in a working open-air foundry, on weekday mornings.
It is an Arizona Historic Site, run by the Cosanti Foundation. Admission is free, self-guided wandering is encouraged, and the free guided tour runs about an hour for roughly a dozen people at a time. If you have already done Taliesin West, this is the required second half of the argument — the apprentice answering the master, and answering him in dirt.
How to do Cosanti right
Weekday morning. That is the answer. The bronze pours and the free guided tours both happen on weekdays before midday, and those are the two things that turn a pleasant twenty minutes into a genuinely memorable hour. On a Sunday afternoon you get a beautiful, quiet compound and a bell gallery; on a Tuesday at 9:15 you get a compound, a tour guide who knows the earth-casting sequence, and a crew tipping molten bronze into sand molds in the open air.
Go down, not around. The paved approach from the parking gravel makes it look like a small retail courtyard. It is not. Take the steps down into the apses and the half-buried rooms; that is where the architecture makes its point, because the temperature drops noticeably as you descend and nothing is doing that except shape and mass. Touch the walls — you can read the grain of the earth mound in the concrete. Look up through the skylights Soleri cast in as glass rondels.
Dress and time it for the desert. It is outdoors, on uneven concrete, steps and gravel; closed shoes, hat, water. October through April is glorious. In summer, morning only — though the ironic part is that Cosanti’s shaded apses are among the coolest outdoor rooms in the Valley without a watt of air conditioning, which was exactly the point Soleri spent sixty years making.
Kids are a mixed bag, in a good way. There is nothing to play on and a lot of breakable bronze, but the pour is legitimate spectacle and the tunnels-and-domes quality of the place appeals to anyone under twelve who likes a fort. Keep hands off the bell displays and it works.
Budget for a bell. Everyone says they are not buying one. The small ceramic ones are inexpensive, the bronze assemblies climb quickly into serious money, and all of them are made forty feet from where you are standing — which is a more honest Scottsdale souvenir than anything on Fifth Avenue.
Pair it properly. Do Taliesin West on one morning and Cosanti on another, in that order, and you have the entire argument about how to build in a desert. Downtown, Soleri’s only bridge — the Soleri Bridge & Plaza at the Waterfront — uses cast panels made at this compound, and it is a ten-minute drive plus a lovely walk along the canal. Cosanti also sits close to Chaparral Park and the McCormick Ranch side of town if you want grass and shade afterward, and the Cattle Track Arts Compound — the other handmade compound in this part of the Valley — is ten minutes south.
The apprentice who dug his own buildings
Paolo Soleri came out of Turin with a doctorate in architecture and a quarrel already forming. In 1947 he joined the Taliesin Fellowship at Taliesin West, where Wright’s apprentices quarried rock and stretched canvas for a master who was not much interested in being contradicted. Soleri lasted a year and a half. What he took with him was the core Wright conviction — that a building should come out of its site — and what he rejected was Wright’s answer to how people should live, which was low, spread out, and one family to an acre. Soleri thought that arithmetic ended in the sprawl he could already see coming. He spent the rest of his life proposing the opposite.
In 1956 he and his wife Colly bought a few acres of Paradise Valley desert and named the place Cosanti, from the Italian for “against things.” Then he started the experiment that defines the site: earth-casting. Silt and soil were mounded into the shape of the void, sometimes carved with patterns and set with glass; concrete went over the top; when it cured, the earth was excavated out from underneath. The technique gave him thin, strong, sculptural shells for nearly no money, in a place with abundant dirt and no rain to speak of. The characteristic form is the apse — a quarter-sphere opening south, so that the sun’s seasonal arc does the shading for you. It is passive solar design executed in 1956, two decades before anyone was using that phrase, by a man with a shovel.
Around a half-dozen buildings accumulated: the original Earth House, dug in and insulated by the ground itself; outdoor studios; a dormitory for apprentices; a performance space; a pool; the gallery. And the windbells. Soleri had been casting bells since his early years in Arizona, ceramic first and then bronze, and they turned out to be a perfect product — small, beautiful, endlessly variable, made from the same casting instincts as the buildings. Visitors bought them. Apprentices made them. The revenue built the compound and then, remarkably, funded a city: in 1970, Soleri broke ground on Arcosanti near Cordes Junction, seventy miles north, as a full-scale prototype of arcology — architecture and ecology fused, cities built compact and vertical so that the land around them could be left alone. Arcosanti is still unfinished, still inhabited, and still partly financed by bells.
Soleri’s Scottsdale legacy is not only at Cosanti. Scottsdale Public Art first approached him about a bridge in 1990, and twenty years later, on December 11, 2010, the Soleri Bridge & Plaza was dedicated at the Scottsdale Waterfront: the only bridge he ever built, its two pylons set six inches apart so that the gap functions as a solar calendar, its plaza panels cast at this compound. He was 91. He died in 2013.
The last turn of the story is almost too tidy. In 2020, after a long dispute with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, the architecture school Wright had founded vacated Taliesin West, gave up the Taliesin name, and moved its students to Cosanti and Arcosanti. Seventy-three years after Wright’s Fellowship took in a young Italian who disagreed with him, the Italian’s foundation took in Wright’s school.
Why it matters
Scottsdale has spent seventy years telling the world it is a design town, and mostly what it means is tile and rooflines. Cosanti is the real thing: a compound where a man tested a theory about how humans should occupy a desert, built the tests himself out of the desert, funded them by selling bells, and left behind rooms that are ten degrees cooler than the air outside for no reason other than their shape. It is free. It is fifteen minutes from Old Town. It is the closest thing the Valley has to a working monastery of ideas, and on a weekday morning you can stand in the shade of a hand-cast dome and watch someone pour bronze while a hundred bells ring above you. There is no better argument for this city than that.